Is Microsoft Outlook Compatible With the iPhone?

Microsoft and Apple may be competitors in the computer market, but Apple's iPhone natively supports connecting to Microsoft Outlook. The Outlook software itself cannot communicate with your iPhone directly, but you can use iTunes on your computer to set up your iPhone to share data with Outlook. After setup, your iPhone and Outlook data will merge every time you sync your phone.

The iPhone can sync both contacts and calendars with Outlook. As of version 11, iTunes supports syncing with Outlook 2003, 2007, 2010 and 2013. You can also sync your mail accounts with Outlook on your computer, but the transfer only works one way; changes to your mail settings will not sync from the iPhone back to Outlook.

You can set up contact, calendar and mail syncing in your iPhone's Info tab in iTunes. Check the option to enable syncing, and pick "Outlook" as your source. When syncing contacts, you can either sync all of your contacts or specific groups. Similarly, you can either sync all your calendar data with Outlook, sync only specific calendars or sync only calendar data for a specified number of days in the past.